In the latest phase of a summer of extreme weather that has brought blistering heat to Britain, drought to the Netherlands and deadly wildfires to Greece, the heatwave affecting parts of southern Europe has reached a new intensity this weekend. According to IPMA, the Portuguese weather agency, about a third of the country’s meteorological stations broke temperature records on Saturday. The highest was 46.4C in Alvega, 120km from Lisbon.

Mass production of plastics started nearly 70 years ago and the production rate is expected to double over the next two decades. While serving many applications because of their durability, stability and low cost, plastics have deleterious effects on the environment. Plastic is known to release a variety of chemicals during degradation, which has a negative impact on biota. Here, we show that the most commonly used plastics produce two greenhouse gases, methane and ethylene, when exposed to ambient solar radiation. Polyethylene, which is the most produced and discarded synthetic polymer globally, is the most prolific emitter of both gases. […] Environmentally aged plastics incubated in water for at least 152 days also produced hydrocarbon gases.

In addition, low-density polyethylene emits these gases when incubated in air at rates ~2 times and ~76 times higher than when incubated in water for methane and ethylene, respectively. Our results show that plastics represent a heretofore unrecognized source of climate-relevant trace gases that are expected to increase as more plastic is produced and accumulated in the environment.

Overall, 2017 was third warmest year on record, Noaa said, behind 2016 and 2015. Countries including Spain, Bulgaria, Mexico and Argentina all broke their annual high temperature records. Puerto Madryn in Argentina reached 43.4C (110.12F), the warmest temperature ever recorded so far south in the world, while Turbat in Pakistan baked in 53.5C (128.3F), the global record temperature for May.

Concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide continued on an upward march, reaching 405 parts per million in the atmosphere. This is 2.2ppm greater than 2016 and is the highest level discernible in modern records, as well as ice cores that show CO2 levels back as far as 800,000 years. The growth rate of CO2 has quadrupled since the early 1960s. […]

In May of last year, ice extent in the Arctic reached its lowest maximum level in the 37-year satellite record, covering 8% less area than the long-term average. The Arctic experienced the sort of warmth that scientists say hasn’t been been present in the region for the last 2,000 years, with some regions 3 or 4 degrees Celsius hotter than an average recorded since 1982. Antarctic sea ice was also below average throughout 2017.

Land-based ice mirrored these reversals, with the world’s glaciers losing mass for the 38th consecutive year on record. According to the report, the total ice loss since 1980 is the equivalent to slicing 22 metres off the top of the average glacier. Prolonged warmth in the seas helped spur a huge coral bleaching event, which is when coral reefs become stressed by high temperatures and expel their symbiotic algae. This causes them to whiten and, in some cases, die off.

A three-year stretch to May 2017 was the “longest, most widespread and almost certainty most destructive” coral bleaching event on record, the report states, taking a notable toll on places such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Global average sea levels reached the highest level in the 25-year satellite record, 7.2cm (3in) above the 1993 average.

Warner Bros. is in the early stages of developing a reboot of the beloved ’80s alien sitcom ALF, TVLine has learned exclusively. The original series — which centered on a hairy, sarcastic extraterrestrial who is taken in by a middle-class family — ran for four seasons NBC, with the series finale airing March 24, 1990. All told, 102 episodes were produced.

Warner Bros. is searching for a writer to spearhead the update. A rep for the studio declined to comment for this story.

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf.

The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Jonathan Pie is the comedy sensation who satirises the world of politics and the media. A frustrated news reporter known for venting his spleen in unguarded “off-camera” rants, his online videos have been viewed by millions worldwide.

As an old-school leftie, Pie’s anger is usually directed towards the Tories. But he has also been known to question the tactics of the left, which has got him into trouble from time to time.

Pie is the brainchild of actor Tom Walker, who first brought the character to life in September 2015. He became a viral hit when he famously ‘lost it’ outside the Houses of Parliament, and his fan base has continued to gain momentum ever since. He has recently finished a tour of his second live show, Back to the Studio, which saw him perform sell-out shows at the Hammersmith Apollo and perform an number of dates across Australia.

Disney had been [Mickey, Donald Duck, Goofys] Intelligent Designer, and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but since he had departed they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I assigned Mad magazine artist Wally Wood to create – as a black-and-white center-spread for The Realist which then became a popular poster – the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy.

Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle. His nephews are jerking off as they watch a combination bed and cash register where Minnie Mouse is fucking Goofy. The beams shining out from the Magic Castle are actually dollar signs. Dumbo the elephant is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey and Louie are ogling Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarves groping Snow White. The Prince is snatching a peek at Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket is leering as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose gets longer and longer.

McCartney might have misremembered when he claimed in a 1970s interview he wrote the melody for “In My Life,” a song from the Rubber Soul album considered quintessential Lennon.

“The probability that “In My Life” was written by McCartney is .018,” Glickman says in the release, “which basically means it’s pretty convincingly a Lennon song.”

Another Rubber Soul song called “The Word,” sung by Lennon and generally thought to be mostly written by him, turned out to have all the touches of McCartney, according to the model. (McCartney also sang this song in concert in 2011; it’s rare for McCartney to cover a number on which Lennon sang lead vocal. A clue to his authorship?)

If future analysis shows that McCartney wrote the classic Lennon song “I am the Walrus,” Lennon’s quip in the tune “Glass Onion” — “The walrus was Paul” — will finally be understood. But that would create a world where up is down and vice versa. Some Beatles fans might have heart attacks.

“Hash Pipe” is Toto’s way of reciprocating for Weezer’s mega-hit cover of their 1982 tune “Africa.” Don’t laugh, this is big business as the mutual admiration society between Toto and Weezer gets yet another page-turning chapter.

For those not in the know, the “Odd Couple” relationship between the legacy rock band of the late 1970s and ’90s millennial whizzes Weezer is the hottest story in music. It all started when a fan requested Weezer to cover Toto’s “Africa.” Weezer responded with a cover of Toto’s “Rosanna,” and followed up with “Africa,” the latter of which has been a huge hit for Weezer.

With the introduction of large-scale datasets and deep learning models capable of learning complex representations, impressive advances have emerged in face detection and recognition tasks. Despite such advances, existing datasets do not capture the difficulty of face recognition in the wildest scenarios, such as hostile disputes or fights. Furthermore, existing datasets do not represent completely unconstrained cases of low resolution, high blur and large pose/occlusion variances. To this end, we introduce the Wildest Faces dataset, which focuses on such adverse effects through violent scenes. The dataset consists of an extensive set of violent scenes of celebrities from movies. Our experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art techniques are not well-suited for violent scenes, and therefore, Wildest Faces is likely to stir further interest in face detection and recognition research. […]

In this paper, we present a new benchmark dataset, namely Wildest Faces, where we put the emphasis on violent scenes with virtually unconstrained scenarios. In addition to previously studied adverse conditions, Wildest Faces dataset contains images from a large spectrum of image quality, resolution and motion blur (see Fig. 1). The dataset consists of videos of celebrities in which they are practically fighting. There are ∼ 68K images (a.k.a frames) and 2186 shots of 64 celebrities, and all of the video frames are manually annotated to foster research both for detection and recognition of “faces in the wildest”. It is especially
important from the surveillance perspective to identify the people who are involved in crime scenes and we believe that the availability of such a dataset of violent faces would stir further research towards this direction as well.

We use reverse correlation to understand how a representative sample of American Christians visualize the face of God, which we argue is indicative of how believers think about God’s mind. In contrast to historical depictions, Americans generally see God as young, Caucasian, and loving, but perceptions vary by believers’ political ideology and physical appearance. Liberals see God as relatively more feminine, more African American, and more loving than conservatives, who see God as older, more intelligent, and more powerful. All participants see God as similar to themselves on attractiveness, age, and, to a lesser extent, race. These differences are consistent with past research showing that people’s views of God are shaped by their group-based motivations and cognitive biases. Our results also speak to the broad scope of religious differences: even people of the same nationality and the same faith appear to think differently about God’s appearance.

The goal of the Evolutionary Computation Bestiary is to catalog the, ermm… exuberance of the meta-heuristic “eco-system”. We try to keep a list of the many different animals, plants, microbes, natural phenomena and supernatural activities that can be spotted in the wild lands of the metaphor-based computation literature.

While we personally believe that the literature could do with more mathematics and less marsupials, and that we, as a community, should grow past this metaphor-rich phase in our field’s history (a bit like chemistry outgrew alchemy), please note that this list makes no claims about the scientific quality of the papers listed

Last year, hackers unlocked an iris-scanning Samsung smartphone by printing an image of the owner’s iris onto a contact lens and then placing the contact lens onto a dummy eyeball. The more gruesome hack from Demolition Man is another way to circumvent these systems. But nobody has worked out whether this form of attack can be detected, until now.

The research is made possible by an unusual database—the Warsaw BioBase PostMortem Iris dataset, which includes 574 near-infrared iris images collected from 17 people at various times after they have died. The images date from five hours to 34 days after death. The team also collected 256 images of live irises. They took care to use the same iris camera used on the cadavers so that the machine-learning algorithm couldn’t be fooled into recognizing images based on the characteristics of different cameras. […]

The results suggest that the algorithm accurately spots all dead irises and rarely misclassifies live ones. “No post-mortem sample gets mistakenly classified as a live one, with a probability of misclassifying a live sample as a dead one being around 1 percent,” says the team.

One reason is that the jet stream—a fast-flowing river of air snaking continually round the northern hemisphere at altitudes of around 6 kilometres—has stalled over Europe since May, and could continue to do so, trapping regions of high pressure that are cloudless, windless and extremely hot. “It’s been a key player in the astounding heatwaves across the UK and Scandinavia this summer,” says Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

She says evidence is mounting that accelerated warming of the Arctic is a major reason why the jet stream keeps getting stalled. The stream is driven by collisions between cold air descending southward from the Arctic and warm air pushing northward from the equator.

The greater the temperature difference between the colliding air streams, the more powerful the jet stream. But the temperature gap—and therefore the power of the jet stream—is being weakened because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, supplying the stream with increasingly warmer air. “Heatwaves over northern hemisphere continents in recent years fit the hypothesis that rapid Arctic warming is playing a role,” says Francis.

He says this summer’s extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere is related to a near-stationary perturbation in the jet stream. Such patterns have been implicated in “many of the most extreme, persistent summer weather events in recent years, including the 2003 European heat wave, 2010 Moscow wildfires, 2011 Texas and Oklahoma drought [and the] 2016 Alberta wildfires.”

In a study published last year, Mann and his colleagues showed that such patterns are becoming more common as a result of human-caused climate change (Scientific Reports, doi.org/f9vwxh). Mann says the “amplified warming in the Arctic” seems to be a major contributor.

Like most octopuses, this color-changing cephalopod is asocial, meaning it likes to be alone most of the time, unless it’s trying to mate.

But when given MDMA, a drug well known for boosting emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in humans (i.e. making you really, really want to fraternize), these octopuses also seemed to want to hang out with each other, even if they weren’t trying to find a mate.

This is interesting not only because these octopuses don’t normally behave this way, but also because the last common ancestor we shared was probably some wormlike thing between 500 and 750 million years ago. We’re pretty different from octopuses — in fact, by some estimates, these eight-legged freaks are the closest thing on Earth to an alien species. So it’s fairly intriguing to see that a drug works on them the same way it does on us.

According to the authors, these findings might tell us a lot about how “ancient neurotransmitter systems are shared across vertebrate and invertebrate species.”

For the most part, yes. The sun powers photosynthesis, allowing plants and plant-eating animals to thrive. Our energy needs also mostly derive from the sun: Old plants and animals can turn into fossil fuels, and renewable sources like solar and hydroelectric power ultimately originate with our local star. But! Nuclear energy and geothermal energy both have independent power sources, so it’s not quite all our power.

The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,

Are moving at a million miles a day,

Alas, our first major error. All the stars visible to the naked eye are indeed within the Milky Way (not counting the combined light from other galaxies), but our orbital speed around the galactic center is about 200 km/s, or roughly 11 million miles a day. The song is off by an order of magnitude.

In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,

The solar system is in an outer spiral arm of our galaxy, but again we’re going at 200 km/s, or 450,000 mph. But 40,000 mph is about the same as “a million miles a day,” so at least the song’s consistent.

First, the bad news. Brown indicates 'Uninhabitable due to floods, drought or extreme weather'. Say goodbye to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., to Mexico and Central America, to the middle third of South America. In Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar are gone; Asia loses much of the Indian subcontinent, including all of Pakistan; Indochina is abandoned, as is most of Indonesia. As the map mentions, “The last inhabitants of (the South-west U.S. are) migrating north. The Colorado river is a mere trickle”; “Deglaciation means (Peru) is dry and uninhabitable”; and “Bangladesh is largely abandoned, as is South India. (In) Pakistan, isolated communities remain in pockets”.

Orange is not much better: 'Uninhabitable desert'. That's most of the U.S. and the rest of South America, almost the entirety of Africa and the southern halves of Europe and Asia. “Deserts have encroached on (Southern Europe), rivers have dried up and the Alps are now snow-free. Goats and other hardy animals are kept at the fringes”, the map predicts.

Red is for lands lost to the rising tide (assuming +4°C adds two metres to ocean levels). This may not seem a lot, but this is where populations are concentrated. In the U.S. for instance, counties directly on the shoreline constitute less than 10% of the total land area (not including Alaska), but account for 40% of the total population.

But there is a flipside. Light-green stands for food-growing zones, and compact high-rise cities. That's Western Antarctica, “unrecognisable now. Densely populated with high-rise cities”. New Zealand, sparsely populated in our time, will also be transformed into a high-density population centre. There will be a lot more room for this in the northern hemisphere: Siberia and Canada, where “reliable precipitation and warmer temperatures provide ideal growing conditions for most of the world's subsistence crops.” And the UK, Scandinavia, Greenland and northern Russia, which will be dotted with compact high-rise cities to “provide shelter for much of the world's population”.

A warmer climate could even lead to reforestation in certain areas of the world, including the Sahel and Western Australia. The regions abandoned to desertification are empty, but not useless: they will be used for solar farming (green dots) and geothermal energy (red dots). Giant wind farms off the coasts of South America, Alaska and in the North Sea will generate the remainder of the planet's energy needs.

From 2008 to 2017, newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23%. In 2008, about 114,000 newsroom employees – reporters, editors, photographers and videographers – worked in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and “other information services” (the best match for digital-native news publishers). By 2017, that number declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.

This decline in overall newsroom employment was driven primarily by one sector: newspapers.

It's been about a week and a half, and, well... Twitter is a lot more pleasant. I've chosen a handful of accounts to follow each day (most ones that I followed before, some entirely new to me) and it's made a big difference. […]

One of the most immediate benefits is that, when something terrible happens in the news, I don't see an endless, repetitive stream of dozens of people reacting to it in succession. It turns out, I don't mind knowing about current events, but it hurts to see lots of people I care about going through anguish or pain when bad news happens. I want to optimize for being aware, but not emotionally overwhelmed.

To that point, I've also basically not refollowed any news accounts or "official" corporate accounts. Anything I need to know about major headlines gets surfaced through other channels, or even just other parts of Twitter, so I don't need to see social media updates from media companies whose entire economic model is predicated on causing me enough stress to click through to their sites.

Similarly, I've focused a lot more on artists and activists and people who write about the stuff I'm obsessed with in general — Prince or mangoes or urban transit or the like. That brings a lot more joy into my life, and people writing about these other topics offer alot more inspiration for the things I want to be focused on.

‘Ugly’ is animated in a manner that feels wholey Diakur’s own. With movement that looks both realistic and broken and imagery that is at times polished only to later deconstruct, Diakur creates a world filled with contrasting dualities that mirror his central theme. To achieve this aesthetic, Diakur outsourced parts of the animation process to dynamic computer simulation. Meaning, Diakur created the scenes and the characters while leaving other aspects of the animation entirely up to a computer’s calculations. Diakur explains that “when you work towards a predictable outcome, it can quickly get boring. A possible escape is to keep the process as accidental as possible.” In doing so, Diakur’s style mimics his film’s central narrative and more broadly, everyday life: we as humans try to control our intentions and actions, but there will always be outside forces of chance that influence our choices.

Each row of this blanket represents the average temperature for that year based on the deviation from the historical average (White). Blues are colder and pink/reds are warmer. Its hard to see, but I even had to use purple for last year (the row at the very bottom.)

Skate:Moss was designed for frog's 2nd annual NYCxDESIGN event, DECKxDESIGN. The prompt was to design a skateboard. No rules. All the entries were sold to public through a silent auction, and 100% of the proceeds went directly to ArtStart, a non-profit that brings the creative arts to underserved and homeless youth.

The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects more than 2 billion people — that is, more than a quarter of the world population. The protozoans can live in many warm-blooded creatures, where they reproduce asexually, but they ultimately want to end up in cats, where they reproduce sexually. Once they breed in cats, their eggs are shed into cat poop, where they can disperse to soil, water or anything else contaminated with the excrement.

And the germ seems to especially like infesting the brain, where it can have uncanny effects on behavior. For example, rats usually have an innate fear of cat urine, a phobia that extends to rodents that have never seen a feline and those generations removed from ever meeting a cat. However, after they get infected with T. gondii, rats love cat pee, increasing the chance they will end up as cat food. […]

The researchers first tested the saliva of nearly 1,500 students to see if they were infected with T. gondii. They found that students who tested positive for the parasite were 1.4 times more likely to major in business and 1.7 times more likely to have an emphasis on management and entrepreneurship compared to other business-related emphases.

The scientists next saliva-tested nearly 200 professionals attending entrepreneurship events. They discovered that those who tested positive for the protozoan were 1.8 times more likely to have started their own business than other attendees.

Finally, the Johnsons and their colleagues examined global databases on national levels of infection with T. gondii and on national levels of entrepreneurial activity. There is a strong level of global variation in T. gondii infection rates, from 9 percent in Norway to 60 percent in Brazil.

The scientists found infection with the parasite appeared consistently linked with entrepreneurship. Moreover, nations with higher infection rates also had a lower percentage of survey respondents citing “fear of failure” as preventing them from starting new business ventures. Future research should examine whether the increase in entrepreneurial attitudes this parasite apparently fosters is actually linked with entrepreneurial success, Stefanie Johnson said. “These people may start a company, but we don’t know if they went under,” she said. “Toxoplasma can reduce fear of failure, but maybe people should be afraid to fail if their idea is horrible.”

Economists often assume that people behave rationally to optimize the outcomes of their behavior, however, these new findings underscore the potential effects that hidden factors might have on human behavior. “A lot of our theories are based on this idea that people choose to be entrepreneurs based on a variety of factors, some personality-driven, but no one has thought it was parasite-driven,” Stefanie Johnson said.

A Japanese advertising company has come up with an unorthodox way to get eyeballs for its clients' products - by placing advertisements on the armpits of young women.

The Wakino Ad Company, which recently began operations, has released photos on its website showing how this ad strategy could be used by recruitment portals, acting schools, detective agencies and more, reported Japanese website SoraNews24.

The ads come in various sizes and are in colour, with "armpit rentals" starting from about 10,000 yen (S$120) an hour.

Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth lies 26 000 light-years away at the centre of the Milky Way. This gravitational monster, which has a mass four million times that of the Sun, is surrounded by a small group of stars orbiting around it at high speed. This extreme environment — the strongest gravitational field in our galaxy — makes it the perfect place to explore gravitational physics, and particularly to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

New infrared observations from the exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY [1], SINFONI and NACO instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018. At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometres from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometres per hour — almost three percent of the speed of light [2].

The team compared the position and velocity measurements from GRAVITY and SINFONI respectively, along with previous observations of S2 using other instruments, with the predictions of Newtonian gravity, general relativity and other theories of gravity. The new results are inconsistent with Newtonian predictions and in excellent agreement with the predictions of general relativity.

Boston Pizza hat sich kleine Ministühle zu den Pizzaabstandhaltern für ihre Lieferpizzen angeschafft: „Boston Pizza (a Canadian chain, actually) and John St. oblige with the Pizza Patio Set, which features miniature chairs in addition to the saver, aka the 'pizza table' or 'ottoman', which is designed to keep that greasy cardboard lid from mashing your sweet, sweet pie.“

234. The point of social media is to interact with other people, and to share ideas. Dr Caroline Tagg, from the Open University, carried out research that showed that people use Facebook to maintain social relationships, and to many people Facebook was not seen as a news media site, but “a place where they carry out quite complex maintenance and management of their social relationships”.

235. Within those social relationships, people tend to connect and want to spend time with others who share their same views and interests, which is when the spread of misinformation can happen so quickly. Professor Lewandowsky, from the University of Bristol, told us about an Australian study on climate change:

Only 8% of people were found to completely negate the idea that the climate is changing but those 8% thought that their opinion was shared by half the population and that was because they were all in this echo chamber and talked to each other and felt their opinions confirmed. I think that is a novel problem that is inherent to the technology. That people think, whatever they think, everybody else thinks the same way.

236. This dependency and reliance on social media comes with worrying consequences, as Tristan Harris told us:

There are many different issues emerging out of the attention economy. The externalities range from public health, addiction, culture, children’s well-being, mental well-being, loneliness, sovereignty of identity and things like that to election democracy, truth, discernment of truth and a shared reality, anti-trust and power. There are multiple issues. There are even more, because when you control the minds of people, you control society. How people make sense of the world and how they make choices are what ID is, and that can affect every aspect of society.

The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. Tsundoku, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let something pile up and is written 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – meaning to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form tsundoku.

In my Energy Slaves comic, I touch upon the imaginary ‘energy slaves’ that do work on behalf of human beings. They are ‘hidden in plain sight’, because they make our lifestyles so effortless. We only notice the ease of our modern lifestyles when the energy slaves disappear during a blackout, a breakdown, or a fuel shortage.

Buckminster Fuller thought that it was important to humanise the energy that we use in our daily lives. Units like ‘kilojoules’ and ‘megawatts’ are too abstract for people to imagine, in a palpable sense. By comparison, we all know what it feels like to have spent an hour jogging on a treadmill.

We know what it feels to have spent an hour shovelling soil in a garden. Once we begin thinking about electricity and fossil fuels as though they are units that replace human labour, we start seeing the world differently. Suddenly, we imagine the invisible people who are hoisting our elevator to the top floor, or the frantic chef who is thrashing our banana milkshake into its frothy glory.

Seeing the imaginary workers serving humanity in this way, we ask ourselves:

- “Where did all of these invisible workers spawn from?”
- “Do all human beings have this many energy slaves supporting them?”
- “What is the difference in slave counts between the world’s richest, and the world’s poorest people? Why is this so?”
- “Where will tomorrow’s slaves come from?”

What makes a true kung fu film? Many directors and actors have been associated with the kung fu genre, Hong Kong cinema’s most unique creation, but no one compares to Lau Kar-leung (1937–2013) as a purist of the genre and the kung fu form.

Associate curator La Frances Hui explores the history of the kung fu films, the actors and filmmakers associated with the genre like Bruce Lee, Gordon Liu, and Jackie Chan, and why Lau Kar-leung has been hailed as the grandmaster of kung fu films.

Abstract: While deep-fake technology will bring with it certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace of ideas already suffers from truth decay as our networked information environment interacts in toxic ways with our cognitive biases. Deep fakes will exacerbate this problem significantly. Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage. The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well.

Our aim is to provide the first in-depth assessment of the causes and consequences of this disruptive technological change, and to explore the existing and potential tools for responding to it. We survey a broad array of responses, including: the role of technological solutions; criminal penalties, civil liability, and regulatory action; military and covert-action responses; economic sanctions; and market developments. We cover the waterfront from immunities to immutable authentication trails, offering recommendations to improve law and policy and anticipating the pitfalls embedded in various solutions.

Aus dem Paper:

Immutable Life Logs as an Alibi Service
Consider a worst-case scenario: a world in which it is cheap and easy to portray people as having done or said things they did not say or do, with inadequate technology to quickly and reliably expose fakes and inadequate law or policy tools to deter an punish them. In that environment, a person who cannot credibly demonstrate their real location, words, and deeds at a given moment will be at greater risk than those who can. Credible alibis will become increasingly valuable as a result; demand for new ways to secure them—for services that ensure that one can disprove a harmful fake—will grow, spurring innovation as companies see a revenue opportunity.

We predict the development of a profitable new service: immutable life logs or authentication trails that make it possible for a victim of a deep fake to produce a certified alibi credibly proving that he or she did not do or say the thing depicted.

From a technical perspective, such services will be made possible by advances in a variety of technologies including wearable tech; encryption; remote sensing; data compression, transmission, and storage; and blockchain-based record-keeping. That last element will be particularly important, for a vendor hoping to provide such services could not succeed without earning a strong reputation for the immutability and comprehensiveness of its data; the service otherwise would not have the desired effect when called upon in the face of an otherwise-devastating deep fake.

Providing access to a credible digital alibi would not be enough, however. The vendor also would need to be able to provide quick and effective dissemination of it; the victim alone often will be in a poor position to accomplish that, for the reasons discussed above in Part I. But it is possible that one or a few providers of an immutable life log service can accomplish this to no small degree. The key would be partnerships with a wide array of social media platforms, with arrangements made for those companies to rapidly and reliably coordinate with the provider when a complaint arises regarding possible deepfake content on their site.

Obviously, not everyone would want such a service even if it could work reasonably effectively as a deep-fake defense mechanism. But some individuals (politicians, celebrities, and others whose fortunes depend to an unusual degree on fragile reputations) will have sufficient fear of suffering irreparable harm from deep fakes that they may be willing to agree to—and pay for—a service that comprehensively tracks and preserves their movements, surrounding visual circumstances, and perhaps in-person and electronic communications; although providers may be reluctant to include audiorecording capacity because some states criminalize the interception of electronic communications unless all parties to a communication consent to the interception.

Schönster Satz daraus ist vielleicht dieser: „People are happy to communicate through animated turds, the US even elected one as their president.“ Und das hier dürfte sich wohl leider als der richtigste herausstellen: „the narratives propagated by the algorithmically generated life-like avatars of commerce, crime and conquest will have ripple effects that have consequences for us all.“

You may already be familiar with the Real-Fake quadrants, a 2×2 matrix used by a loose collection of internet weirdos known as the Cross-Quadrant Working Group to think about ways in which products and processes move through the world. The syntax used is the pairing: {presents as} — {actually is}, the canonical example used is a pet dog.

Your actual pet dog is Real-Real, it presents as a real dog, and it actually is one. Say your dog had been Photoshopped into a family photo, and it was done really well, that would be Real-Fake. It presents itself as being your real dog, but it is in fact a fake. The example for Quadrant 3 is somewhat convoluted, but imagine you had a dog that was somehow genetically engineered so that it looked artificial, but it was in fact a dog, you would have yourself a Fake-Real dog. Finally, a cartoon dog is a Fake-Fake dog.

This system provides an interesting framework for thinking about how we create concepts and bring them into reality. Take for example a Design Fiction product demonstration, that’s a Real-Fake. It presents itself as a real product, but it is in fact fake. If you were to kick-start it and it turns into an actual product it becomes Real-Real. Understanding the ways in which concepts and objects (both physical and virtual) can be moved through these quadrants to affect their reality can be a very useful tool in understanding its construction. Shit hits the fan however when you get this:

Ostensibly this a Real person telling you the Real news, but, as you’re now all very well aware, this may now a Real person telling you Fake news. You could even argue that this is a Fake person telling you Fake news, and now with deep-fake technology that person may not even just be metaphorically fake but an actual Fake person, which could also just as easily be telling you Real news.

So what do we do? We could add a Z axis? Genuine — Disingenuous? Authenticity? Credibility? Verifiability? All depend on the point of view of the viewer and the narrator, and quickly your nice 2×2 matrix becomes an unusable kaleidoscopic tesseract of mess.

Take all of the above, roll it into universally-deployable avatars and shove them in your pockets. Now at any time you can get a notification and all of a sudden have a real-life realistic rendered entity pop up anywhere telling you anything at all, at any time, with you not having any means of distinguishing what is real from what isn’t.

In order to come up with ways in which real-time video manipulation could be (ab)used you don’t need to look any further than the documents published in the Snowden leaks. This one in particular comes courtesy of GHCQ (Britsh intelligence services), from the presentation The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.

This slide often gets ridiculed for its poor design, and while it is visually heinous, please take a moment to carefully inspect the middle column, “Influence & Info Ops”. What you will find is a laundry list of abuse. “Building Relationships”, “Mirroring / Mimicry”, “Social Penetration”, these are all things deep-fake video manipulation systems are perfectly suited for. Not to mention “Self Presentation in Cyber context”, NARRATIVE, and then funnily enough all on the same pile, PROPAGANDA, BRANDING, MARKETING and ADVERTISING.

The streaming service Shudder has given the green light to a Creepshow TV series inspired by the classic 1982 horror anthology film of the same name, EW can exclusively reveal. Greg Nicotero, the Walking Dead executive producer and makeup effects wizard, is attached to direct, executive-produce, and supervise the show’s creative elements.

A homage to the horror comics of the 1950s, the original Creepshow featured segments written by Stephen King and was directed by a fellow horror legend, Night of the Living Dead filmmaker George A. Romero. The movie starred Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Leslie Nielsen, Ed Harris, and King himself, and it spawned two sequels and a spin-off comic. Shudder is owned by AMC Networks (home of The Walking Dead) and specializes in thriller, suspense, and horror fare.

“Creepshow is one of the most beloved and iconic horror anthologies from two masters of the genre, George A. Romero and Stephen King,” Shudder general manager Craig Engler said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to continue their legacy with another master of horror, Greg Nicotero, as we bring a new Creepshow TV series exclusively to Shudder members.”

The founders have led development efforts on blockbuster games such as the original Star Wars: Battlefront, and the Seismic team currently works with major partners like Marvel, FoxNext, Sony Television, Alcon Interactive, and others, on cutting edge mobile and VR games like Marvel: Strikeforce & Blade Runner: Revelations. Seismic will continue to see through its existing slate of titles in development as it transitions into building all new AR experiences with Niantic.

We recently gave a peek under the hood of the Niantic Real World Platform, and we see the addition of Seismic Games as a significant accelerant for realizing our vision of an operating system that bridges the digital and the physical worlds.

]]>https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/catching-superheroes-porgs-in-augmented-reality/feed/2Conversations with People Who Hate Me Episode 19: Latinxhttps://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/conversations-with-people-who-hate-me-episode-19-latinx/
https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/conversations-with-people-who-hate-me-episode-19-latinx/#respondMon, 23 Jul 2018 11:44:15 +0000http://pinboard.in/u:walt74/b:c9fc261f0ed9/Latinx is the gender-neutral alternative to the terms Latino and Latina. Kat Lazo is a content creator who made a video explaining why some people use it. Alvaro commented “this chic is annoying” beneath that video. Dylan connects them on the phone.

https://mediandr-a.akamaihd.net/progressive/2014/0320/AU-20140320-1655-4642.mp3
]]>https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/ndr-das-feature-stanley-kubrick-ein-leben-fuer-den-film/feed/0The 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. Less than a hundred were made. My father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love. It is his passion… it's for sale.https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/the-1961-ferrari-250-gt-california-less-than-a-hundred-were-made-my-father-spent-three-years-restoring-this-car-it-is-his-love-it-is-his-passion-its-for-sale/
https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/the-1961-ferrari-250-gt-california-less-than-a-hundred-were-made-my-father-spent-three-years-restoring-this-car-it-is-his-love-it-is-his-passion-its-for-sale/#commentsMon, 23 Jul 2018 10:19:59 +0000https://nerdcore.de/?p=292999

Cameron: „The 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. Less than a hundred were made. My father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love. It is his passion…“

In the 1986 movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) gave his friend Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) an impressive introduction to, “The 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. Less than 100 were made. My father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love. It is his passion.” “It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage,” Ferris finishes off for his friend as he enters the garage and begins caressing the car and ogling over the red machine before sliding behind the wheel and firing up the engine.

The three cars used in the film were not Ferraris at all, but rather three Modena GT Spyder Californias built by Modena Design and Development in El Cajon, California, were utilized. This is one of those cars used in the movie, complete with documents from Modena Design attesting to such. Modena incorporated a number of Ferrari-style elements, such as the windshield, turn signals, grille, hood scoops, fender vents and a custom fiberglass body that was supposedly modeled after an MG, creating a close profile to the original Ferrari. The chassis was of the rectangular steel-tube frame design, built by Bob Webb, who worked on Roger Penske’s Zerex Special.

After nine months of refreshing and updating by one of the founders of Modena Design, Neil Glassmoyer, this car emerged looking stunning.

]]>https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/the-1961-ferrari-250-gt-california-less-than-a-hundred-were-made-my-father-spent-three-years-restoring-this-car-it-is-his-love-it-is-his-passion-its-for-sale/feed/4My Effing First Amendmenthttps://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/my-effing-first-amendment/
https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/23/my-effing-first-amendment/#respondMon, 23 Jul 2018 09:30:56 +0000http://pinboard.in/u:walt74/b:fb23a7d8e889/Conservative students don't feel like their ideas are welcome on campus. So they're fighting back. We go to Nebraska, where one skirmish spins out of control.

This extreme political moment is playing out on college campuses, places that are already at the extreme end of politics. Outside groups are getting involved, helping conservatives fight back against angry liberals on campus. Producer Zoe Chace tells Ira about a conference she went to, hosted by Turning Point USA, where students get trained on how to fight these battles.

Reporter Steve Kolowich goes to the University of Nebraska where one new recruit to Turning Point goes out on campus to sign people up for her club. And that one act immediately devolves into a political battle of epic proportions. This story is part of a collaboration with The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read Steve Kolowich’s print version of the story.

The brawl on the mall of the University of Nebraska turns into a fiasco at the state capitol, as legislators try to step in and dictate what should happen at the university.

Veteran comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock say that millennials can’t take a joke — but some comics often won’t ever get the opportunity to perform on campus in front of them.

They complain college campuses are minefields of competing grievances and sensitivities for comics whose jokes touch on sensitive subjects like assault or gender,

VICE News went to Boston to talk to three campus bookers — the college comedy gatekeepers — who contend that they’re merely reflecting student taste.

They say they feel old-school comedians are woefully behind the times and need to acknowledge that certain jokes, particularly those about identity and sexual assault, can potentially cause psychological harm. And it’s their job, they say, to protect students from it.

But at New York City’s famous Comedy Cellar, where VICE News talked with standup Judy Gold, nothing is off limits (provided that the joke is funny). Gold also warns students that the “world doesn't have to adjust” to student sensitivities.

Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use them.

HOW DO DARK PATTERNS WORK?
When you use the web, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another. You can defend yourself by learning about Dark Patterns on this site.

Rockstar Language Specification

Increment and Decrement
Increment and decrement are supported by the Build {variable} up and Knock {variable} down keywords.

Build my world up will increment the value stored in my world by 1.Knock the walls down will decrement the value stored in the walls by 1.

Poetic Literals

Rockstar also supports a unique language feature known as poetic literals. Inspired by the here-document syntax supported by many scripting languages, poetic literals allow the programmer to simultaneously initialize a variable and express their innermost angst.

Poetic Type Literals
For the keywords true, false, nothing, nobody and nowhere, a poetic assignment is a single line consisting of a variable name, the is keyword and the required value literal

- My heart is true - initialises the variable my heart with the Boolean value true
- Tommy is nobody - initialises the variable Tommy with the value null using the nobody alias

Poetic String Literals
A poetic string literal assignment starts with a variable name, followed by one of the keywords says followed by a single space. The rest of the line up to the \n terminator is treated as an unquoted string literal.

- Billy says hello world!\n will initialise the variable Billy with the string literal "hello world!"
- The world says hello back\n will initialise the variable the world with the string literal hello back

Poetic Number Literals
A poetic number literal begins with a variable name, followed by one of the keywords is or the aliases was or were. As long as the next symbol is not a reserved keyword, the rest of the line is treated as a decimal number in which the values of consecutive digits are given by the lengths of the subsequent barewords, up until the end of the line. To allow the digit zero, and to compensate for a lack of suitably rock'n'roll 1- and 2-letter words, word lengths are parsed modulo 10. A period (.) character denotes a decimal place. Other than the first period, any non-alphabetical characters are ignored.

Comparison
Similar to the single-equals operator in Visual Basic and some scripting languages, the is keyword in Rockstar is interpreted differently depending whether it appears as part of a statement or as part of an expression.

Comparison in Rockstar can only be done within an expression.

- Tommy is nobody initialises the variable Tommy with the value nobody
- If Tommy is nobody then - will execute the next line if, and only if, the variable Tommy is equal to nobody

The modifier not will invert the meaning of the comparison, similar to IS NULL / IS NOT NULL in SQL. The keyword ain't is an alias for is not. This usage runs contrary to idiomatic English, where "Tommy isn't anybody", "Tommy ain't nobody" and "Tommy ain't not nobody" somehow mean exactly the same thing.

Rockstar also supports the comparison syntax is {comparator} than, where {comparator} is defined as one of the keywords higher, greater, bigger or stronger to denote 'greater than', and the keywords lower, less, smaller and weaker to denote 'less than'.

Input/Output
Use the Listen keyword to read one line of input from STDIN. Use Listen to to capture the input into a named variable.

- Listen to your heart - read one line of input from STDIN and store it in your heart

Modulus takes Number and Divisor
While Number is higher than Divisor
Take Divisor from Number
Give back Number
Limit is 100
Counter is 0
Fizz is 3
Buzz is 5
Until Counter is Limit
Build Counter up
If Modulus taking Counter, Fizz is 0 and Modulus taking Counter, Buzz is 0
Say "FizzBuzz!"
And Continue
If Modulus taking Counter and Fizz is 0
Say "Fizz!"
And Continue
If Modulus taking Counter and Buzz is 0
Say "Buzz!"
And Continue
Say Counter
End

And here's the same thing in idiomatic Rockstar, using poetic literals and no indentation

Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller
My world is nothing
Fire is ice
Hate is water
Until my world is Desire,
Build my world up
If Midnight taking Desire, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking Desire, Hate is nothing
Shout "FizzBuzz!"
And take it to the top
If Midnight taking Desire, Fire is nothing
Shout "Fizz!"
And take it to the top
If Midnight taking Desire, Hate is nothing
Say "Buzz!"
And take it to the top
Whisper my world
And around we go

Dreaming, some sleep scientists say, is a psychotic state—we fully believe that we see what is not there, and we accept that time, location, and people themselves can morph and disappear without warning.

From ancient Greeks to Sigmund Freud to back-alley fortune-tellers, dreams have always been a source of enchantment and mystery—interpreted as messages from the gods or our unconscious. Today many sleep experts aren’t interested in the specific images and events in our dreams. They believe that dreams result from the chaotic firing of neurons and, even if imbued with emotional resonance, are devoid of significance. It’s only after we wake that the conscious brain, seeking meaning, quickly stitches together a whole cloth out of haphazard scraps.

Other sleep scientists strongly disagree. “The content of dreams,” says Stickgold of Harvard, “is part of an evolved mechanism for looking at the larger significance of new memories and how they could be useful in the future.”

Deadly Class adapts the Image comic of the same name by Rick Remender, Wes Craig, and Lee Loughridge. Here’s the official description of the comic:

It’s 1987. Marcus Lopez hates school. His grades suck. He has no money. The jocks are hassling his friends. He can’t focus in class, thanks to his mind constantly drifting to the stunning girl in the front row and the Dag Nasty show he has tickets to. But the jocks are the children of Joseph Stalin’s top assassin, the teachers are members of an ancient league of assassins, the class he’s failing is “Dismemberment 101,” and his crush, a member of the most notorious crime syndicate in Japan, has a double-digit body count.

Welcome to the most brutal high school on Earth, where the world’s top crime families send the next generation of assassins to be trained. Murder is an art. Killing is a craft. At King’s Dominion High School for the Deadly Arts, the dagger in your back isn’t always metaphorical, nor is your fellow classmates’ poison.

On the internet, the gap between next door and next continent implodes. Northern Baroque paintings, Triassic fossils and yesterday’s op-eds are tabs on the same browser. Raised by a global chorus of voices, our identities are voluntary, malleable and unprescribed. We are everywhere, anytime and everyone at once.

Along with architect Jack Self and graphic designer Jonathan Castro, 032c devoted the cover story of its summer issue to mapping a new cultural moment we call The Big Flat Now. This terrain is already a platform for new forms of creativity, upvoted into existence by the same mass who invented them. In this ecosystem, gesture, friendship and amateurism have replaced jargon, messaging and expertise. Product design has become a form of DJing — and DJing has become a form of product design. Contemporary art and luxury fashion have come to operate according to the same logic, sharing practitioners who glide freely between each field. Film, music, fashion, visual art and the marketing machines that support them have been compressed into a unified slime called “content.” […]

Some voices, especially those who prognosticate about the internet being the end of culture, have confused The Big Flat Now with postmodern irony. They describe this new order’s cultural products as collages that simply push around pre-existing references. However, there is nothing inherently inauthentic or cynical about this activity.

The early days of the mainstream internet were dominated by mashups and remixes, but creative license in the era of The Big Flat Now is about being both at once. The spirit of the mash-up was driven by the novelty of seeing two unexpected things appear side by side, as well as the pseudo-countercultural act of intervening in pop culture. The humor of this gesture falls flat for Generation Z, whose unparalleled degree of visibility and cultural access makes irony feel cheap. Where remixing is part of a dialogue about the zeitgeist, the condition of being both is strictly about the future. It describes a reality in which we can all own new space, rather than competing to replicate the status quo.

While past modes of communication relied on explanations, definitions and arguments, creative practitioners today operate predominantly through mood and ambiance. Through the logic of “being both,” The Big Flat Now will present us with concepts that push toward the edges of our existing systems of meaning. When a mumble rapper chants an inaudible hook, or a stylist refers to an “early grunge color story,” they are each practicing their craft on the edge of language. Tech mogul Elon Musk and indie star Grimes’ unironic romantic relationship; Playboi Carti’s use of sounds as opposed to words to make a lyrical patchwork in his songs; and the baby dragons clutched in the arms of models on the Gucci Autumn/Winter 2018 runway — are all phenomena that can be decoded through the lens of this new paradigm.

Following the global success of “Godzilla” and “Kong: Skull Island” comes the next chapter in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ cinematic MonsterVerse, an epic action adventure that pits Godzilla against some of the most popular monsters in pop culture history.

The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species—thought to be mere myths—rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.

David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) directs New Line Cinema’s “Shazam!,” the origin story that stars Zachary Levi (TV’s “Chuck”) as the titular DC Super Hero, along with Asher Angel (TV’s “Andi Mack”) as Billy Batson, and Mark Strong (the “Kingsman” movies) in the role of Super-Villain Dr. Thaddeus Sivana. Peter Safran (upcoming “Aquaman,” “The Conjuring” and “Annabelle” films) serves as the film’s producer.

We all have a superhero inside us, it just takes a bit of magic to bring it out. In Billy Batson’s (Angel) case, by shouting out one word—SHAZAM!—this streetwise 14-year-old foster kid can turn into the adult Super Hero Shazam (Levi), courtesy of an ancient wizard. Still a kid at heart—inside a ripped, godlike body—Shazam revels in this adult version of himself by doing what any teen would do with superpowers: have fun with them! Can he fly? Does he have X-ray vision? Can he shoot lightning out of his hands? Can he skip his social studies test? Shazam sets out to test the limits of his abilities with the joyful recklessness of a child. But he’ll need to master these powers quickly in order to fight the deadly forces of evil controlled by Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Strong).

From Warner Bros. Pictures and director James Wan comes an action-packed adventure that spans the vast, visually breathtaking underwater world of the seven seas, “Aquaman,” starring Jason Momoa in the title role. The film reveals the origin story of half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur Curry and takes him on the journey of his lifetime—one that will not only force him to face who he really is, but to discover if he is worthy of who he was born to be…a king.

Recognizing that these dark web ideas are conservative might also help clear up space for people on the left of center who might share some criticisms of political correctness or campus activism without indulging the right-wing implications of these ideas. Many people across the political spectrum recognize that political correctness and its variants are not meaningless terms. It is no surprise that college students often experiment with activist projects that push the boundaries of liberal norms, and the members of the intellectual dark web are not the only people to have worried about the implications of some student rhetoric.

In the 1990s, left and progressive thinkers including Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Edward Said made clear their reservations about certain activist tactics, and articulated positions in line with the same universalist values neoconservatives claimed as their own. Today, magazines like Current Affairs dedicate much of their content to debunking the claims of dark web figures while also addressing the limited effectiveness of “social justice warrior” politics. Treating the beliefs of the dark web as politically conservative views, rather than a sort of transpolitical meta-position — that is to say one critique of political correctness among others, albeit an extreme one — could do much to bring these sorts of left alternatives into the public debate.

The Shining Overlook Hotel runner and rug, perfect for making a statement in hallways and corridors is made especially for Film and Furniture by the UK’s sole license holder of the original 1960s Hicks’ Hexagon carpet design by legendary interior designer David Hicks

- Highly limited edition, high quality, custom made, hand tufted rug
- 1 ply wool
- Made to order
- Carpet pattern as seen in The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring.

The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for a ragtag band of right-wingers who are surging all over Europe, in many cases without professional political structures or significant budgets.

Bannon’s ambition is for his organization ultimately to rival the impact of Soros’s Open Society, which has given away $32 billion to largely liberal causes since it was established in 1984.

Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.

He envisions a right-wing “supergroup” within the European Parliament that could attract as many as a third of the lawmakers after next May’s Europe-wide elections. A united populist bloc of that size would have the ability to seriously disrupt parliamentary proceedings, potentially granting Bannon huge power within the populist movement.

the languages that generate the strangest results—Somali, Hawaiian and Maori—have smaller bodies of translated text than more widely spoken languages like English or Chinese. As a result, he said, it’s possible that Google used religious texts like the Bible, which has been translated into many languages, to train its model in those languages, resulting in the religious content.

“If they tried to build a model out of that stuff, it may be that the model simply throws a hail-mary pass (pun semi-intended) and barfs out a piece of its training,” said Colbath, who emphasized that he was speaking for himself rather than for his employer, in a chat.

Rush agreed that if Google is using the Bible to train its model, it could explain some of the strange outputs. Indeed, several of the bizarre translations in Somali resemble specific passages from the Old Testament. Exodus 27:18 references a hundred cubits, and several verses including Numbers 3:18 discuss the sons of Gershon.

]]>https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/21/ghost-of-google-translates-machine-learning-strikes-again/feed/1Keyser Soze is a Muppethttps://nerdcore.de/2018/07/21/keyser-soze-is-a-muppet/
https://nerdcore.de/2018/07/21/keyser-soze-is-a-muppet/#respondSat, 21 Jul 2018 16:40:26 +0000https://nerdcore.de/?p=292802FilmCritic Hulk: „You can replace the cast of any movie with The Muppets, but you keep one of the human actors. What movie and which human do you keep?“ Ich so: Die üblichen Verdächtigen, aber behalte den Polizisten. (Ich würde gerne die Schlussszene mit 'nem weglaufenden Muppet-Keyser sehen.)

Ein paar Favs aus dem Thread:

„The Matrix, but keep Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith. His annoyance directed towards Muppets would be hilarious. Plus, Kermit as Neo would be perfection.“

A systematic investigation of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in mouse and human cells has discovered that the technique appears to frequently cause extensive mutations and genetic damage that the researchers say wouldn't be detected by existing DNA tests.

"This is the first systematic assessment of unexpected events resulting from CRISPR/Cas9 editing in therapeutically relevant cells," explains geneticist Allan Bradley from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.